Specialty Coffee News and Events from Around the World

Event Report

December 13, 2010

Thursday'smeeting went very well. A big thank you to Seattle Coffee Works for letting us crash their lovely coffee shop right in the middle of closing time. Thanks to everyone who showed up and participated, and thanks to everyone who helped spread the word.

We had a very interesting discussion, and lots of topics for future meetings were raised. It was great to see some old friends, and to make some new ones. If you missed the meeting, you missed out! But that's ok, we'll have more.

My plan is to have the next Seattle Coffee Society meeting some time in late January. Fresh crop northern hemisphere coffees will start making their appearances here and there, so if you have access to samples and want to donate them for a cupping, please contact seattlecoffeesociety (at sign) gmail (dot com). I'm happy to roast, set up the cupping, and do research on the samples, if you can provide them.

Also, if you are interested in donating either your time, your coffee, or your venue, please contact us! Cheers.

September 15, 2010

How do coffee buyers decide which coffees they will carry? They taste them. In this video you can get an inside look at this process.

We put over 60 fresh-crop lots of Ethiopian coffees, each with a different flavor profile, in front of coffee buyers all over the United States this past spring. I posted about this project in the spring, here, here, and here. This video explains the outcome.

March 01, 2010

This is the project I have been working on for the last couple of months. I helped organize two of these "Cupping Caravans." The first one was just completed! In Yirgacheffe and Sidama. I'm really proud and pleased to see that it went off well.

The second one is in two weeks, in Harar. I will be there to lead that group. I'm really excited.

September 29, 2009

I work in coffee and I was born and raised in Seattle, WA, and yet it's been four years (!) since I participated in Coffee Fest Seattle. Well, this last weekend I got my fill of Coffee Fest-ivities at the Convention Center downtown, as well as at various spots around town. This is really more than one event...

One. The Actual Show. Lots of great coffee and interesting products on the show floor again this year. There was an understandable skewing toward Northwest companies, like Caffé Vita, Synesso, and the honorary Northwesterners, La Marzocco USA.

The best cup of brewed coffee I had all weekend (though not the Coffee of the Week... I'll get to that in another post), came from the Hario booth, where I got a perfect pour-over cup of Intelligentsia's fresh crop Kenya. Thanks to Bronwen for taking me by the hand and guiding me to the Hario booth when I was jonesing on Friday morning. (Hario also wins best business cards for their flaming hot pink numbers).

The funnest little activity at the show was the Aroma Challenge where you had to take a quiz on matching Le Nez du Café vials of essential aromas to a list of aromas. Very tough! I got 10 out of 16, though as soon as I turned in my sheet I realized I had misidentified the most obvious one (potato!) and should have got 11 right. Anyway, it was a fun challenge.

2. The Northwest Regional Barista Competition. I didn't actually see even 2 minutes of this thing, though I hear it was fantastic as always. Northwest barista legend Billy Wilson took the gold. You can read about it on coffeed.

3. Party Madness. Lots of fun at the party at Visions Espresso on Friday night, where baristas played with their array of different espresso machines while the wine and cheese flowed. Coffee people are the most fun people there are to have parties with, I've decided. They get really wired on coffee, then they start drinking. Sarah Allen also led an expeditionary party up the hill from downtown to Linda's, which is actually my old stomping grounds (those many years ago), where we took over an entire banquette outside and drank Tecate and argued about coffee.

On Saturday night it was thee Latte Art competition between Seattle and LA hosted by Victrola. Even more people at this one. Got to see lots of great friends. The LA folks took the competition pretty handily, to Seattle's undying shame. But a good time was had by all. Victrola really has the perfect location and space for parties of this kind (fire marshall regulations aside... it got a little too full at one point).

4. Cupping at Coffee Enhancement Lounge. Sunday it was back down to Visions for a wonderful, peaceful, clean cupping of those pacamara coffees I have been talking about lately. It was the perfect way to wrap up the weekend. The CEL has great natural lighting... the sun was shining in through the skylight. Sarah put on Elvis Presley, and we cupped 14 beautiful coffees in peace and calm.

I really hope to do more stuff at CEL soon. It's such a great location and the folks at Visions are the greatest.

....

At some point this weekend, I did have the Coffee of the Week. But this post is getting too long, and I have a coffee shop review I want to get to, too. So I'll post that a little later. The hint is the picture at the top of this page, if you know that man.

September 17, 2009

Thank you to everyone who participated in yesterday's cupping at Think Coffee in Manhattan!

Graciano Cruz was unable to make the trip up from Panama at the last moment, which left everyone to deal with me. Somehow they endured, and we had a great cupping session with some really interesting and fantastic coffees on the table.

I've done a lot of events for/about/thanks-to El Salvador over the last few years. I've gotten to know the industry there so well that at times I think I begin to take it for granted. Or I assume that people know more about it than they do. I'm hoping to do another event featuring these great coffees in another week or two, in Seattle, and leading up to that event, I intend to write more about exactly why they are so great.

In the meantime, I can tell you we did one table of six washed bourbon coffees, and one table of six washed pacamaras and two natural coffees (one bourbon, one pacamara). The bourbons were very nice gems: sweet, medium-bodied, good acidity and clear as bells. But, as anyone who's cupped it before knows, the pacamaras were the real stars. There's such a unique, exotic edge to those coffees: a buttery mouthfeel and a peculiar herbaceous quality, on top of the chocolatey sweetness found in their bourbon cousins.

Of course, the other stand-outs were the natural coffees. People don't expect these flavor profiles from Central American coffees. I overheard a couple of people discussing how much they tasted like Ethiopians or Yemens, but cleaner. There's a lot of potential for natural-process coffees in Latin America in the coming years. Very, very few producers in Latin America understand how popular that flavor profile has become in the United States. The savvier ones are starting to get wind, and you get coffees like the ones we cupped yesterday (and reactions like the ones I witnessed). I want to feature the farms that are experimenting with this kind of processing on this blog, but first I want to get some more information from my friends in Central America.

Finally, a huge word of thanks to Think Coffee. If you ever want to see a really well-run coffee shop, stop by Think, get a table near the register and watch the baristas work their high-speed magic. Special thanks to Jason and especially Sarah, for allowing us to do the event and for their hard work and kindness.

August 13, 2009

Actually, Mandy Aftel is not a coffee person. She's a scent person. But coffee has scents (boy does it), and I met Mandy at a coffee event and well... let me explain.

A little while ago an old friend in the coffee business asked me if I could speak at an event at the New York Botanical Garden, and I happily accepted. All summer the NYBG has been hosting Edible Evenings, focusing on the intersection of plant life and food (a mighty big intersection, that). Last Thursday was their Coffee and Tea evening. I was to speak on coffee, and speaking on tea was Mandy Aftel.

Now, Mandy's not coffee person, as I said. But actually she's not necessarily a tea person either. What she loves more than anything though, and what she is expert in, are natural perfumes. The first time I spoke to her on the phone she gave me an impassioned speech on the evils of synthetic aromas until I admitted surrender and granted that, yes, natural perfumes are far superior. Naturally.

One beverage that gets perfumed constantly, of course, is tea. At the Botanical Garden event, Mandy passed around scent strips with synthetic and natural versions of different scents (jasmine, rose, etc). Then she passed around samples of different oolong teas, scented with different combinations of lovely scents like mint, jasmine, and turkish rose. It was a real eye-opener to smell the difference that naturally-derived perfume can make.

It was my first trip to the Botanical Garden (this is the big one up in the Bronx that is practically its own National Park, not the smaller but still lovely one in Brooklyn that I have visited several times). It's a lovely setting for events such as this one, or just a great place to wander around. I wish I had had more time to wander the the grounds... I guess I will just have to go back another lovely evening.

(Daniel giving his talk. photo by Maria Diaz.)

Of course, in coffee, we don't want any additives, natural or otherwise. Just coffee, heat, and water please. In my presentation, I spoke about the vast panoply of different aromas in coffee, and where they come from. My friend and colleague David Latourell was on the spot with some impeccable coffees from Honduras and Ethiopia for people to taste and smell.

It's important to remember that coffee is a seed. As a seed, it packs a ton of different organic compounds into a tiny package, to serve as nutrition for a growing plant. We're talking fats, acids, proteins, sugars, etc. That means that when you roast it up and brew it, there is more complexity in that little package than you can shake a flavor wheel at. I'd be interested to know what the total chemical complexity of tea is versus coffee before additives, given that tea is a leaf and coffee is a seed. I'm out of my element to speculate on that, but of course you won't be surprised if I say I wouldn't be surprised to learn that coffee is much more complex.

Being around Mandy Aftel for a couple of hours gets one thinking in these directions. She's done lots of interesting work with various chefs, perfumers, food scientists and yes, coffee people. I've got one of her Natural Perfume Wheels at my side as I type this. In one category, "Floral," she has four sub-groups: Heavy, Soft, Sharp, and Green. And within those groupings, reading from Heavy to Green, I see tuberose, ylang ylang, champa, jasmine, orange flower, orris, cassie, rose, mimosa, lotus, frangipani, marigold, kewda, osmanthus, davana, neroli, ginger lily, violet leaf, linden blossom, lavender absolute, and geranium.

August 10, 2009

A week ago I attended the 2009 Roasters Retreat in Brattleboro, VT. About forty coffee professionals from around the Northeast USA converged in that beautiful small town for two days of lectures, cupping, discussion and barbecueing.

The retreat was organized by Donny Raus of Raus Coffee in Connecticut. Donny is one of the original members of the New York Coffee Society, and he subsequently founded the Connecticut Coffee Society. I also had the pleasure of visiting coffee farms in El Salvador with Donny for a while earlier this year. He's very active in the world of specialty coffee, and the whole NERR was his doing.

Our hosts for the event were the fine people at Mocha Joe's. Pierre Capy let us into his roasting facility for the second day of learning and discussion. It's a great company filled with friendly people, situated up against the Connecticut River, which you can watch flowing lazily by from the large picture windows in their office area. Pierre also generously hosted a fantastic party at his beautiful home outside of town, complete with grazing cattle, a swimming hole, barbecue and beer, bottle rockets, a campfire, and little munchkins running around playing with squirt guns. I've rarely been so charmed in my life. A large thank you to the whole Capy family for hosting us.

Among the speakers were some true coffee experts. Vince Fedele of George Howell's Terroir Coffee Company gave a fascinating preview of an amazing piece of equipment they have developed. It's called the Extract MoJo, and I hope to get my hands on one very soon. The Extract MoJo deserves its own post, but to summarize, it's a tool for determining the extraction ratio and the strength of brewed coffee and espresso. And those are two very different things, as Vince expertly explained. The Extract MoJo is a two-part product, featuring a device that measures coffee extraction using refractometry, and software that helps you analyze your data.

Willem Boot was in attendance and gave two nice lectures/demonstrations on sensory evaluation of coffee and coffee roasting. And I got to lead a cupping and discussion of some great Salvadoran coffees. In fact, as I was explaining the Cup of Excellence cupping form to the audience, Willem Boot reminded me that the very creator of that form, George Howell, was in the room. George kindly took over that part of the presentation and gave a dynamite overview of cupping for quality.

The coffees were brought fresh from Central America by Panamanian coffee farmer and entrepeneur Graciano Cruz. After the cupping, during discussion of the coffees, George and Graciano led a spirited debate about the merits and dangers of natural processed coffees.

Next year's conference is still up in the air. The organization is looking for it's Donnys and Pierres to lead the next event. Judging by the excellent quality of events and networking that went on this year, if some angel were to come along and organize the next one, surely the karma generated would fill a 20 kilo Probat!